NEW YORK — Over 11 intoxicating tracks, Lorde's Melodrama (out Friday) paints a picture of booze-soaked nights and woozy romances. But the perceptive pop star didn't set out to make an album about a single house party.

"I'm not a particularly conceptual writer in that way and it's not a concept album," says Lorde (real name: Ella Yelich-O'Connor), who discovered the songs' loose narrative thread as she was writing. A night out "is a really interesting metaphor for young adulthood and encapsulated all of the emotions that I wanted to cover."

'Sober'

Melodrama's slinky second number "is about being a little bit involved with someone and it's magic when you are out — you're just king and queen of the weekend, you own the party. You're maybe committed and you haven't talked about it, but there's this thing at the back of your mind: 'What's it like when we're not doing this?' I definitely felt like I had moments where I was like, 'I need to get drunk to tell this person how I feel.' I know a lot of young people feel like that."

'Homemade Dynamite'

"It’s definitely the lightest song on the record. It's that moment in every evening where everyone’s at a good level and maybe the sharp edges of the evening haven’t quite shown themselves yet. I wrote (the song) with Tove Lo. She was in a similar phase where she was partying a lot and we were able to really bond over it." Frank Dukes' co-production sounds "kind of janky and bootleg. Some of those textures ended up informing where we went with the rest of the record."

'Liability'

Yelich-O'Connor wrote more than 50 songs with Bleachers' Jack Antonoff for Melodrama, of which, Liability was the first to make the cut. After she and her now ex-boyfriend split up, "I realized I had to learn to be OK with being by myself and enjoying my own company. That’s something that everyone has to learn when they come out of a long-term relationship, it’s a whole thing. It felt like a nice little protective talisman. After I had written it, I was like, 'Oh, now I feel really safe against this feeling,' because I had been able to voice it."

'Writer in the Dark'

The tongue-in-cheek ballad was written "from the perspective of something being finished, but still feeling like I had something I wanted to say. It’s something a lot of female artists have to contend with, which is you share all this stuff about the people you love, and sometimes people can make you feel like a villain for doing that. I guess me (writing this) was my way of being like, 'I was always this person. I was a writer when I met you, I'm going to be a writer when you're gone. That’s what happens when you kiss writers.' It was my way of being able to fully let go, like, 'I'll always love you, but I'm also this person. It's just what happens.' "

'Perfect Places'

When she penned the bleary-eyed album closer last summer, "the news was so stressful and I was so aware of the claustrophobic nature of stuff going on. I was very aware that I was using parties as escapism and a lot of my friends were as well. I feel like last year, everyone was just kind of getting blasted and you were like, 'You're not usually like this.' But it was such a reaction to what an intense year it was for everyone. That's where that song was born out of, but it took a long time to get the tone right. You don't want it to be preachy or put a narrative onto people."